Sounds like a perfect use case for Particle + Lora.
In my experience, the trees themselves have little affect on range, especially a hardwoods. It's likely a different story in a dense evergreen forest but most of my experience has been in hardwoods.
It's much more about terrain. I've found the best tool to understand terrain and identifying possible locations for a Particle + LoRa hub or a repeater for optimal coverage is using OnX Maps. Specifically they have a feature in Beta called Terrain X where you can see the "Viewshed". Basically, what's theoretically in line of sight:
In the vast majority of my setups, all end nodes talk directly back to the the LoRa+Particle device. Where a repeater is required, it's 1, sometimes 2 strategically located repeaters on top of a ridge.
As for end nodes, the simplest way to prototype would likely be using Adafruit Feather M0 LoRa node:
That's the hardware I used early on to prototype.
You also may want to check with @chipmc. He's spun up a carrier board for the Boron and as a similar design for a generic LoRa end node (not Particle based).
I will look to share more broadly but, since @jgskarda mentioned the LoRA board I designed, I thought I would share.
For the LoRA Gateway, I added a LoRA radio footprint to my carrier board. This way I can just plug in a Boron for cellular backhaul or an Argon for WiFi backhaul. This effort was described here:
For the LoRA Nodes: I plan to use these LoRA nodes in a number of different applications so I designed this board to be fairly generic. I started with @jgskarda's design and made some changes to make this more of a general purpose board. The board combines the following:
Power control and support for Solar charging
LiPO charging with temperature charging safety
Microchip ATMEL SAMD21-G processor with debugging / programming header
micro-usb connector and ability to do serial programming
2k EEPROM for configuration and retaining data through resets / power off
AB1085 Real Time Clock and Watchdog. Circuit to support power cycling and power off sleep for long battery life
Temperature / humidity sensor to monitor conditions inside the enclosure
LiPO fuel gauge to monitor battery
LoRA Radio Module RFM-9X
I also plan to add fuses and ESD protection for the external connections.
Here is what it looks like. The idea is that all you need to add is a battery, a sensor and optionally a solar panel.
Yes, I am often tempted by slick well engineered LoRAWan devices. I hive purchased and played with them a few times. If you have LoRAWan service where you are operating and these devices can meet your criteria (weather, battery, reporting frequency....) then they are absolutely the way to go.
Yeah, Agree with Chip. I know this post is daunting to read through. It touches on a bit of LoRa vs LoRaWAN early in this thread before we get into the technical details. In the very first post, I put my perspective on pros/cons of the two:
If you have mains power, good internet connectivity (WiFi or Ethernet), and ideally an indoor location, you might be better off with deploying a LoRaWAN indoor gateway, but if any of those are limitations for your use case, then the Particle + LoRa (Point to Point) has a lot of benefits.
